When the Elephants Dance

by Tess Uriza Holthe

  WHAT WAS THE Philippinas like in 1870? You would not believe it if I told you. You must remember this was nearly thirty years before the execution of reformist Dr. José Rizal became the match to light the voice of oppression against Spanish rule. Manila in particular was so new, like a baby flower just sprouting from the dirt, but with a promise of great beauty. Spain had opened Manila to world trade and foreign investment. Everywhere one looked, great churches were being designed and baptized with Spanish names, Santa Isabela, Santa Teresa, San Pedro. Houses were being built on hillsides, with great verandas that circled the entire villa. And in Manila Bay, where the white flowers grow, you could see ships of every possible nation represented. Dutch ships, barges carrying spices from India, from Thailand, from France. Great ships arrived from Spain each month, carrying more of our people. We Spaniards owned all the land.

  At the square, our women paraded in elaborate dresses. They wore the most delicate lace to cover their silken hair. The señoritas were exotic flowers adorning an already outlandish island.

  Our ancestor was said to have arrived in 1521 with the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan serving under the Spanish royalty. This ancestor was whispered to be a bastard, a descendant of Philip II, the king of Spain, for whom our beautiful islands are named. Our grandmother was rumored to have been a lavandera, a Filipina woman who cleaned clothes. Our uncles had admitted to this on numerous occasions when they had partaken of too much wine.

  To look at us, you could not tell. We looked pure Spanish. Oscar, in fact, had blue eyes. I myself have only the hazel, as you can see. Brown when I am near the earth, green when I am in a garden or forest. We were very handsome, and we were favored among the ladies of both classes, of both nationalities. Although Oscar liked to dabble with any beautiful woman, he courted the Filipinas only in secret. He did not like to be frowned upon by his peers or turned away by the lovely Spanish flowers, who turned up their noses at the delicate Filipinas. “Why lie with the filth of the savages?” was the common saying then.

  I loved only the Spanish women. I thought that nothing could compare to them. The way they looked down at you, with their straight noses, and enticed you with their dark round eyes kept me awake at night. I painted many images of them to canvas, just from memory. I thought of those arms that could wrap around your neck like clinging vines, their skin the color of cream, ah, and those bodies … ay, María.

  I was very different then. I felt I owned the world. If Oscar and I were at the market, even if we had money to pay, and quite often money was literally falling out of our pockets, we would grab up a mango or suhà, the giant orange, and take it without paying. The merchants knew our family controlled most of their trades, and they could say nothing.

  We would peel the fruits with our teeth and spit it back at them. Even as the merchants were scrambling to clean away the mess, I would kick it away. We were wild boys. What would you expect? No father, with only rich, arrogant uncles to mimic.

  We lived in a large house with an upstairs and a downstairs, with more than a hundred or more hectares of land. We were of the Ilustrado class, descendants of the educated upper class. We had completed our studies in Spain. Oscar studied law, so he could “always fool the officials with their own game,” he used to joke.

  I was creating a name for myself as a great artist. I had studied with the famous Spanish artist Joaquín Sorolla in Valencia. Probably only the old people know that. You know the grand mural in Santa Teresa church? The three panels of the Virgin as she beholds the Ascension of her Son into heaven, where the doves are flying around her like a halo and the angels with their great wings are bowing down before Him, the Messiah? I painted that one.

  The one of large yellow orchids on the cupola of the library in Santo Tomas, that was me at sixteen. Tsk, tsk, that was a romantic one. I was very romantic as a boy. If you look closely at the corner flower, the name on the bumblebee is “Anna Lisa,” a Spanish girl I was in love with for a week. I was also commissioned to do many portraits for private families. I painted many of those, but the ones that sold for high prices were the ones I was later persecuted for.

  They called me a child genius at the time. In Madrid they said I had great promise. I was their answer to Italy’s Raphael. My teacher wanted me to stay longer, but even then I had the Philippinas running in my mind. The hot days and nights, the tropical flowers, and our lovely señoritas dark from the island sun.

  I have seen a few of my paintings since then, in the homes of people who do not know that I painted them. Imagine, people turning up their noses at me and saying, “But what does a peasant like you know about art? Look, look at this … ah, but only a master could have painted such a design, no? Study the balance of this piece. Look how he captures the light; look at how the eyes of the woman in the painting seduce you.” You can imagine how I laughed inside, when I agreed, “Yes, you are right, only the very best master.” Yes, I remember now, I walked on stars then.

  Painting was in my blood, the deep colors of olive, green, blue, yellow, and rust, all flowing through my veins. You cannot imagine the gaudy sunsets that our islands displayed, unmarred by the smoke and mechanical instruments of today. I can still smell the yellow paint, and with the yellow paint, the yellow flowers I had conjured in my mind. It pervaded the room, so sweet. So sweet, that time was.

  I STILL REMEMBER the morning of Oscar’s nineteenth birthday. We woke very early, with the golden rose of the sun just breaking the sky and the cool mountain air still lingering at the base. I loved those mornings, waking up and inhaling from my window the sweet smell of a certain kind of flower we called bella maria, which climbed outside our house. It had the scent of jasmine, rose, and orange rinds. That is the only way I can think to describe it. Think of the fresh scent of an orange when you first peel it, add to it the fragrance of the rose, then you will be close. It was colored like a flame, deep yellow and red. My mother loved this flower, so it clung to our house, perpetually scaling to touch the heavens. That morning our house was still asleep, for our family loved to rest. First they slept, and then they rested in their beds, curling and stretching their toes beneath the silken Indian sheets.

  I was awake before Oscar. I remember becoming instantly alert and padding barefoot to his room. “Oscar, psst,” I whispered. There was really no need to whisper; I could have shouted to the rafters and no one would have stopped me. The men in our family were allowed to shout and throw tantrums whenever we wished. Oscar was such a heavy sleeper that I kept chunks of garlic in a tin beside my bed, which I used in place of smelling salts. I took out a clove, hammered it loudly with the heel of one of my best shoes, and shoved it into his nose until he woke up shouting and we wrestled to the ground.

  Oscar was a good fighter; he managed to flip me over and land on top of me before he even opened his bleary eyes.

  “Oscar, the cliffs, remember?”

  “¿Qué? Oh, the cliffs! Sí. Bien. Vamanos. What are you waiting for, imbecile? Get dressed.”

  I rolled my eyes and immediately put on my short pants and shirt. When I looked over at him, I realized what he had meant by telling me to get dressed. He had fallen asleep in his clothes, still wearing his sandals from the night before. I remember I had left him at a card game with a woman five years his senior draped over him.

  “What hour did you come home?” I asked.

  He merely smiled. “If you’re not old enough to stay awake, baby, then you’re not old enough to ask.”

  I hated when he called me that; it was short for baby brother, but it was incredibly embarrassing in front of the women.

  We took two of our uncle Hector’s new Arabian stallions; they were loco, not broken in yet, but not as crazy as Oscar and me. We laughed as the horses threw us a couple of times and kicked out at tree stumps. We flew through the woods, dodging the trees as the horses sped left, right, left, right. They were magnificent. We were so stupid.

  “Come on, Eighth, I dare you!” Oscar shouted. That was what we
called the curse. It became a being we were fighting against, no longer an idea, but an actual force of energy.

  We hired sea gypsies to take us across the turquoise freshwater lakes in their battered boats and colorful masts, to Palawan. Barracudas cruised alongside and bared their fangs at us as we maneuvered past the fissured limestone rocks. When we arrived at the chalk cliffs on Coron Island, we looked up in shock. They were tall, fifty meters, eighty in some places. There were little crevices, thin and narrow, where you could barely stick your fingers in. Oscar began to shout and take off his shoes and shirt.

  “Come on, little brother, I will show you how this is done.” Oscar loved to be the one to say he had initiated me into this or that habit. So of course I liked to beat him, to say I had done it first.

  Within seconds I had stripped down to my trousers. He had gotten a head start of about two feet when I reached up and grabbed his ankle and pulled him down and then scrambled up without looking back at him.

  As I scrambled up the cliff, he shouted, “I am coming, Fredrico, damn you, you had better hurry!”

  It was very dangerous, this thing we were doing. The rocks were not smooth, like the ones in the ocean, curved from the passage of time and water. These were like pointed sickles. You had to spread your legs on either side of you, like this, and you had to spread your arms so that you were anchored in more than just one area. You had to curl your toes like this, tightly, as if they were trying to write with a pencil. The cliff in some areas jutted forward, so at times you were hanging with your back parallel to the ground.

  It was going smoothly, our little adventure, when I got to an area where the cliff jutted forward. I could have moved to the right, but then Oscar would have passed me. I shoved my fear down my throat and reached for the protrusion.

  “Fredrico, no!” Oscar shouted as I lost my footing. We were hanging twenty feet in the air and I with my back even with the ground. I gripped as hard as I could and my other foot scrambled to stay put, but the cliff began to crumble and soon I was hanging only by my hands, and then by only one hand. I could have died. And do you know what Oscar did? He let go of one of his hands and put it beneath my back until I regained my footing. I was breathing hard, the tears stinging my eyes.

  Then I heard it, the awful crumbling, the breaking off of a portion of the cliff. And when I turned to look, Oscar went sliding down the face of the cliff. He hit his leg on the way down and landed with his arm twisted behind his back.

  That was how my brother started the first day of his nineteenth year. We arrived home with Oscar roaring drunk from the doctor, with his broken arm in a sling, and the party for his birthday had just begun. “The Eighth tried to grab me today. But I spat in his face,” Oscar boasted. My uncles clapped him on the back and roared that he was now a man.

  “My boy, have you visited the church today?” asked Friar De Guzman.

  “I said enough prayers to satisfy our Maker today, “Oscar replied. “Say one for me when you go home tonight, Padre.”

  The friar sniffed. “I am to accompany your group. I have been invited.”

  Oscar looked at the friar curiously, but our tito Jorge grabbed my brother by the arm and paraded him around to all the lovely señoritas, saying, “This is my nephew.”

  “Que guapo,” said the young señoritas behind their black-lacquered fans. How handsome. Zoila Rodriguez was there.

  Zoila was tall and statuesque, with a graceful neck, much like a swan. Her hair was the color of honey, and her eyes were like sherry. But she was not a sweet girl. In fact, she was spoiled like a rotten papaya. She bruised easily if her wishes were not followed, and she would never let you forget it.

  In the middle of the evening I noticed that Oscar was having trouble with his woman. She was becoming sour, stomping her feet and looking away from him. Zoila also was watching us from across the room. Friar De Guzman walked over to them. I did not like his familiarity with Zoila.

  The men were uneasy, like a group of caribous in a field of lionesses. Oscar stood beside me and put away a small glass of whiskey. He was glassy-eyed, and he smelled of alcohol. My brother could drink even a Russian to his grave and afterward run faster and fight better than any man I knew. Except for the smell, you could not tell how many bottles Oscar had enjoyed. Alcohol affected him differently; it enhanced his coordination, it made him stronger.

  “What is happening with the women? Why are they staring at us like that?” I asked.

  “They forget their place. Guadalupe believes she has influence over me. I only let her entertain the idea. They know where we are going tonight.”

  I leaned back and looked up at Oscar. “Where are we going?”

  Oscar grinned. “Didn’t Tito Jorge tell you? We take a trip to the other side of the island.”

  “Where do you mean?” I frowned, knowing the other side of town was infested with Filipinos. “Why not go to one of the dance halls on our side? Surely we have better, cleaner ones.”

  “It is not the dance halls that we care about, Fredrico.” Oscar laughed. “Just when I think you are catching up to me, I realize that you are still just a boy.”

  You can imagine how his taunt irritated me. He was watching my face. He threw back his head and laughed, then bent close.

  “It is not the dance halls we are interested in, but the dancing girls.” He grinned. “Tito Salvatore knows a place. All virgins.”

  I made a face. “That is what they all say. Why are you interested in such women? Our women are ten times lovelier than any in the world.”

  “But what about our other women? Do we not have their blood running through our veins as well, brother?”

  “That is just a rumor.”

  Oscar studied my frown. “Oh yes, and your skin turns a deep brown in the summer for no reason. Of course, you can stay here with the women if you like.” He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “We shall tell you all about it in the morning. You’ve had too much excitement for the day, Fredrico.”

  I pushed his hand away. “Lead the way, imbecile.”

  Oscar put his good arm around me and announced to the room, “My brother has spoken. We go.”

  I was unsure about the whole affair. It was true we had Filipino blood running through our veins, but we had been brought up as mestizos; we looked down upon the natives. They were unintelligent and unsophisticated. I hated the way they squatted in the streets begging for food, or the way they ate with their hands, like savages. I could not imagine Oscar wanting to lie down with one of these women. But I was always curious and always game for anything.

  “LOOK AT THESE streets.” I gestured wildly with my hands from the window of our kalesa. “They are riddled with squirrel holes. What could Tito be thinking bringing us all here?” We had ridden with a caravan of men, at least forty of us from the party and some we had picked up along the way. We were going through a very poverty-stricken part of town, and the villagers sat out on their stoops, watching us curiously. I shifted uneasily in my seat. I entertained thoughts of dingy chairs supporting my weight and my clean suit soaking in the dirt. I thought of roaches walking over my fine Italian shoes.

  Young boys dirty and dark from the sun ran up to our carriage with their hands outstretched, begging for money. Little girls with their unkempt hair plastered to their faces stood in the streets barefoot, twisting their skirts.

  “Fredrico—” My brother elbowed me. “Stop frowning, you shall frighten the children.”

  “Well, how long do we plan on staying?”

  “We have not even arrived yet! Heavenly Father, you are starting to sound like Mama.”

  Our retinue continued down the crippled street, and thankfully the houses began to look more respectable. As we approached a satisfactorily large house, I was surprised to find we had left my brother’s party to arrive at another. Music was coming through the large double doors; they were thrown open, with two servants sitting on the steps. Two stocky Filipinos stood as we alighted, and they looked at us with cold
eyes.

  “Look at them. They do not want us touching even their whores.” I shook my head, stepped down, and began to roll up my sleeves. “I would have preferred not to fight tonight.”

  Oscar lifted his chin at them and glanced at me. “Whores? What are you speaking of, baby? This is a birthday party. There are no whores here. Not publicly. These are all young women from well-to-do Filipino families.”

  “Madre de Dios. You will get us killed tonight, brother.”

  MY UNCLE FLAVIO led the way as the rest of our uncles looked at the Filipinos and made a good joke about them. Friar De Guzman stayed close behind my uncles. We walked into a grand hall and people stared. I heard whispers of “The Spaniards have arrived,” and all the guests turned to look. The women were nervous, while the men gazed at us with stone faces. A group of ten men came to stand before us, their arms crossed.

  “Get out of my way. You block my view,” Uncle Jorge ordered.

  “Tito,” I said.

  A woman came and invited us to sit. I remained standing, expecting a fight to break out at any moment. Oscar strode right up to the birthday girl and asked for a dance. She blushingly went out onto the floor with him. I stayed stuck to the wall.

  I watched the women as they ran around trying to make things right. The air filled with tension with each gesture they made. Their men watched us through slits, their mouths tight. The birthday girl’s mother offered us drinks and sweets as the rest of our group told jokes and took bets on whether they would bed her daughter by nightfall. Friar De Guzman disappeared behind a table of tubâ. He filled a glass for himself and then boldly took out a flask from his robe and proceeded to fill the tin, heedless of the deadly looks the Filipinos directed his way.

  “We shall get shot,” I muttered, cursing. It was ludicrous, all this way when we had our own women waiting for us at home. Does a dog in heat go searching in the next yard when he has a willing mate nearby? “To hell with this,” I said, and went outside to smoke a cigar.